Archive for July, 2014

We all know cars in Malaysia are fucking expensive due to its ridiculous tax structure. But a few years ago, in a bid to encourage people to buy hybrid vehicles, the primate government of Malaysia for once did something right… by introducing some tax exemption for imported hybrid vehicles. That was a period when the sales of hybrids soared and flourished (that was also the time I bought my Prius, at 145k bucks – not exactly cheap but, it could have been more expensive if it wasn’t for the tax exemption). Then come last year, the government decided to pull the fucking plug on the tax exemption thingy (in a wily scheme of things involving Proton) and the prices of imported hybrid vehicles has since gone back to ‘normal’ (fully taxed, like any other fucking cars). Here, take a read of what Paul Tan posted on his website :

UMW Toyota have released the new prices for the Toyota Prius and Toyota Prius c after the government’s tax incentives for CBU hybrid vehicles ended at the end of last year.

The following are the new prices, OTR including insurance for private registration:
Toyota Prius – RM 216,400.52
Toyota Prius Luxury – RM 230,916.00
Toyota Prius C – RM 153,170.43
As you can see, a B-segment Prius c now costs as much as a D-segment Camry, while the Prius and Prius Luxury‘s prices have been pushed up to way over RM200k.

The Prius was first launched in Malaysia in August 2009 with the pricetag of RM175k. The RM175k pricetag was possible because of a 100% import duty exemption and a 50% excise duty exemption. The government later increased its incentives to 100% exemption for both import duty and excise duty, bringing the Prius price further down to RM139,900.

Later, the Prius facelift was launched in 2012 with two spec levels – the normal Prius for RM143k and a Prius Luxury for RM148k. The smaller Prius c came in at two spec levels – RM97k for the normal spec and RM104k for the Prius c TRD Sportivo.

While the Prius and Prius c were pretty popular cars when they had tax-free prices, we don’t think there will be many takers for these two cars at these new price levels, except for buyers who qualify for tax-free pricing such as those under the TalentCorp program.

However, UMW Toyota is set to come back into the incentivised hybrid game with the Toyota Camry Hybrid. Pricing was last rumoured to be slightly higher than the RM181k range-topping Camry 2.5V. In fact, we’ve already seen the Camry Hybrid at JPJ Putrajaya as well as driving on public roads.

This model did not qualify for the previous CBU hybrid incentives which required a model to have an engine of 2.0 litres and below as it had a larger 2.4 litre engine. The Camry Hybrid will be locally assembled to qualify for duty exemptions for CKD hybrid cars provided by the 2014 National Automotive Policy (NAP), which doesn’t set an engine displacement limit. The new CKD hybrid incentives are set to last until end-2015.

If you’d pan over to the comments section, there was a huge outlash by the readers at PaulTan.org – that the price tag was fucking ridiculous, etc, and they could have bought a much better alternative like a Volvo or a fucking Golf GTI or something. Some would even condemn the past owners (like me) for being ‘stupid & gullible’ to buy the car during the ‘tax exempted’ period and now I have to fucking rue about my purchase because spare parts are going to be a problem. Can you fucking believe that? That’s the dumbest shit ever. How can I be ‘stupid & gullible’ if I bought a car with less tax levied on it? I guess it will be smarter to buy a car with full tax and higher price, just as long the person could live at peace with the expectation they’d get a plethora of spare parts around? LOL!

You know, what amuses me the most is, these readers complained like they’ve not seen anything like this before, but little do these amateurs realize that they’ve all been fucked in the ass – all these while – with the same rusty dick full of spikes, with the same rip-off of a tax structure on every goddamned consumer car on sale in Malaysia! A small car with puny engine that costs 60 fucking grands!? (believe me, that’s the best selling vehicle in Malaysia!) And these people think it’s ‘cheap’! (but really, they don’t have much choice, I can understand that. It’s anything but cheap). That’s like a prison inmate jeering at zoo animals for not having freedom! I guess the general Malaysian has been inured to the shit they’ve been dished out all their lives, that they’re now living in a delusional state.

So now, to the question (if one has to ask) – do I feel sore about this whole price hike thing? Of course not! I think I might have just struck a deal of a lifetime! The car I bought 2 years ago, is close to 100 fucking grands more expensive today! How about that? Have you bought a car like that before? I think I might be able to sell it at a profit even… but that’s just wishful thinking.

My neighbors’ kids are scared of me. That’s because I deliberately acted stern and fierce, so that they’d all stay the fuck away from our house. But there was once, a couple of them came to our house, and something didn’t go as expected.

My then 6 year old daughter Regine, brought this little neighbor girl (let’s call her Small Turd, she’s 5 years old) to right next to my computer table. I was watching TV at that time, and it was dark. I didn’t actually know they were at my house, and you can imagine that I was quite surprised to see the silhouette of my daughter and a much smaller child standing at the doorway, one of them crying. It was Small Turd. She was crying with a dreaded look on her (like she’s about to be eaten by a cave troll). Apparently, along with Small Turd’s brother (Big Turd, he’s 7), they had been watching TV at our house, when Small Turd suddenly went Blue Screen and started to wail like she had an infected appendix. My daughter brought her to me because
a) She was between concerned and annoyed with the wailing.
b) I was the only adult available (my wife was bathing or something). She had no choice.

I don’t normally speak to them but I had to…

“Small Turd, why are you crying and what do you want??”
“WAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!”

She wailed louder just because the cave troll spoke to her. She must be fucking terrified and I swear she was probably going into the rigor mortis stage alive. Not yielding any answer, I then asked my daughter what’s going on, and she told me Small Turd wanted to go home, but her brother didn’t want to budge from the TV. That was when I stomped out of the room and confronted her brother:

“Big Turd! What’s wrong with you and your sister?? Why is she crying??”
“Err… she wanted to go home while we were watching the TV…”
“Then why aren’t you bringing her home??”
“I already asked her to go home herself, it’s just downstairs…”
“She’s your goddamn sister! What kind of a brother are you?? What if she gets kidnapped by a stranger?? Are you stupid or something??”

He almost shat in his pants, and brought his sister home pronto. Problem solved. Probably would never ill treat his sister ever again, thanks to the cave troll. Never saw them come to our house again, and they’d stay the fuck away from me. They’d sometimes play around the corridor, but always with a hushed volume. My daughter, just to get a kick of seeing them terrified, would sometimes tell them ‘you guys should keep the volume down, or my dad would come out and he won’t be pleased!’.

When that happens, my day is usually made. Seeing them annoying kids terrified and behave themselves…

I was peeing in the shower the other day, like I always do, when I noticed that the floor was unusually ‘deep brown’ in color. It was like, someone had just spilled a glass of black tea there. In that mere few seconds, the first thing that came across my mind was blood in my pee… and then ‘Urinary Tract Infection’, promptly followed by the phrase ‘Fuck Me’. Before my panic starts to set in, my pee stopped, and the deep brown color continued to spread across the bathroom floor. That was only then I realized that it couldn’t have been my pee. Then I took a look at my shower and verified it by spraying the water on the wall tiles – and confirmed that it was all along the fucking muddy water.

Ask yourself, how many fucking times have you come across muddy water from your tap? All the fucking time in Penang. Water filter is a thriving business in Malaysia, and it happens for a reason – our water quality is bad. Really bad. So bad, that my Company T Indian counterpart (who has been living in the US for decades, but he grew up in India) dared not to drink any of our iced water. Why? Because that fucker knew that our ice cubes are made from the filthy tap water and that shit will literally fuck him up real good. He’d insist on bottled water every time, and won’t touch anything else. He’d rather risk dehydration through lack of water rather than dehydration through a loose bowel. Can you imagine that? A fucking guy from India, with his mutated guts from years of dirty water/food radiation, abstaining from drinking our Malaysian water. That fucking tells you a lot about our country, really.

And we still wanted to be a developed nation, when we can’t even get clean water (or even water at all, ask the people living in Gombak). That’s like a janitor wanting to be a GM of a company, when the fucker can’t even think past being a janitor. I am wondering why do we even bother building those expensive longest fucking bridge in South East Asia or send another Mangkuk Ayun to the outer fucking space… why aren’t we spending our money revamping the water treatment facilities, the pipings and all? Why are we even bickering cross state with various assholes about ‘water leasing’ and stuff like that? If we want to become a developed nation, shouldn’t the basic necessities be taken care of the very first priority? Food and water for that matter? (and we have ministers wanting to eradicate the poor by shooing off the soup kitchens, how smart).

It’s mind boggling if you ask me. This and many other things. The fucking government. As useless as appendix.

There was a call for help from someone (let’s call him, The Hill Guy) in Company T, requesting help to ‘donate’ some urgent engineering parts to meet an important schedule. The Hill Guy apparently had been searching the world, and through word of mouth, discovered that I was the only one that could be of help (sort of like, his last resort… else he’d be fucked). Being professionally courteous, I agreed to ship him the required parts on the next business day (expected to reach The Hill Guy’s place only the next day). The reason was simple – his request came in on Friday afternoon and I needed time to locate the parts, pack for shipment and do all the paperwork to facilitate the request (you know how it goes in the corporate environment). The Hill Guy ‘seemed’ thankful in his email reply.

Fast forward to the next business day when I was preparing the charity shipment, my boss’ boss (that’s 2 level above me), sent me an email requesting an explanation over an alleged escalation from The Hill Guy’s department – demanding me to fucking get them the part on the very same day (which was borderlining impossible)… because they have a super important deadline to meet. I went like… “WHAT THE FUCK IN NINE HELL IS THIS LOAD OF FUCKING SHIT??” (in disbelief). Can you believe that?? I couldn’t believe it when I first got the email. It was mind boggling.

If you do not get the gist of this ‘escalation’, this is like complaining someone’s car being not comfortable enough when that someone is sending you to the fucking hospital to save you from dying. If you still do not get the gist of it, well, you can also imagine this akin to a beggar making a police report that the coins you gave him aren’t new enough. Still do not get the gist of it?? Then you should fucking die.

I made a somewhat lengthy reply after that to my bosses about this whole fabricated mess, and luckily they understood what was going on and calmed the fuck down (and I was worried about that). But the disappointing thing was, my bosses still wanted to continue to be courteous after learning about The Hill Guy’s bullshit. I proposed to my boss ‘Let’s delay his shipment. That’ll teach the turd some lesson about being grateful…’ But it was turned down because apparently, it isn’t a ‘Company T’ culture to do such dishonorable thing. Yeah right, like it’s Company T’s culture to be of such low character and backstab people for their own gain… If this were to happen in Company Y, I’d have resorted to not send the whole fucking thing at all and watch The Hill Guy burn (I actually did this kind of thing before).

Anyway, I got the stuff sent out the same day as required, much to the chagrin of The Hill Guy (he wanted it shipped out faster than that, which I have no idea how. Teleportation?). But karma is a bitch, the database that handled the shipment had an expected error and shipment was stuck in the warehouse until late afternoon that day. Never heard of anything after that. Maybe he got fired or something.